Team:Slovenia

Biological drugs such as hormones, enzymes, cytokines or antibodies are increasingly used to treat different diseases. Due to systemic administration, these drugs often have adverse effects. Additionally, the high cost of biopharmaceuticals imposes a heavy burden on health systems.

We aimed to develop a safe and cost-effective biological in situ production and delivery system for biological drugs to increase the quality of patients' lives. This system should increase compliance to the therapy, minimize the number of required invasive procedures and introduce advanced multistage therapy while local administration could reduce the side effects.

We addressed this challenge by implementing microencapsulated engineered mammalian cells that can be regulated from the outside to produce different therapeutics, should be reliable, cost effective and safe.

Biological drugs have lately been replacing chemical drugs in the treatement of numerous diseases due to their more specific nature. The current route of biological drug administration is usually intravenous or subcutaneous, which means that the drug is distributed more or less throughout the whole body, although its function should often be restricted to a specific organ or tissue. This can cause serious side effects, requires larger dosage and consequently raises the price of therapy. Our solution to this problem is to implant cells producing biological drugs inside the very tissue where the drug is required. The drug producing cells are safely sealed inside microcapsules, preventing dissemination of these cells and protecting them from destruction by the cells of the host immune system. The implanted cells are able to produce different types of drugs and switching between them can be controlled by a physician depending on the stage of the disease. We invented a new type of switch that will allow selecting production of different biological drug combinations in the affected tissue. We have modified cells for use in the therapy of hepatitis C, where the engineered cells produce a biological drug that has antiviral activity followed by a drug that improves liver regeneration. For the therapy after a heart attack we designed cells to suppress inflammation and promote the formation of new blood vessels around the affected tissue. A physician may initiate self-destruction of the cells and capsules by an outside stimulus when the therapy is over or at any other given time. We believe our system to be safe and effective and applicable to the therapy of different types of diseases.